“Bloody hell, man, I’m supposed to be dead!” Following the recent London premiere of Julien Temple’s latest kaleidoscopic documentary, Wilko Johnson played a sweat-streaked gig at the 100 Club on Oxford Street, strutting up and down the small stage like a berserker, swapping gleeful looks with the great Blockheads bassist, Norman Watt-Roy, machine-gunning the audience with the staccato strumming of his black Telecaster. It was an extraordinary show, made all the more remarkable by the fact that Johnson wasn’t supposed to be there at all. Indeed, Temple’s unexpectedly celebratory film began life as a chronicle of a death foretold, doctors having given Wilko less than a year to live following a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer in 2012. Yet here he was – larger than life, stranger than fiction, and cooler than Canvey Island on a rainswept afternoon.

Temple previously documented Johnson’s life and works in 2009’s Oil City Confidential, a blistering account of the “Thames Delta” blues that once made Dr Feelgood Britain’s best live act. Using scattershot movie clips (a directorial trademark) to emphasise the band’s outlaw status, Temple painted Wilko as a star-gazing seer – a one-time teacher and future astronomer; erudite, energetic and electrifying. In some ways, this companion piece is more universal, its focus broadened from the deconstruction of 12-bar blues to wider issues of the soul.

Significantly, Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death proves an alchemical element amid a brilliantly chosen blizzard of clips from FW Murnau, Jean Cocteau, Luis Buñuel, Andrei Tarkovsky et al (although I could have lived without the decapitated chickens of Sergei Parajanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates). Meanwhile, a motif inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal places Wilko on a sea wall playing chess with Death, reflecting playfully upon the transformative power of mortality.

Talking to Temple, Johnson seems like a man whose eyes have been opened for the first time

Sidestepping the five phases of the oft-quoted Kübler-Ross Grief Cycle (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance), Johnson reacts to his own diagnosis with a sense of elation, a euphoric awareness of life. Refusing treatment (“If it’s gonna kill me, I don’t want it to bore me”), he embarks on a farewell tour, serenading international crowds with Bye Bye Johnny and recording the new album Going Back Home with Roger Daltrey.

Talking to Temple, Johnson seems like a man whose eyes have been opened for the first time, finally relishing the experience of life on Earth. Images of nature flash before us – magnified and intensified – but it’s Wilko’s voice that captivates, quoting Donne, Blake and Milton as readily as Muddy Waters, contemplating the strange beauty of towers burning at the break of day. At one point, recalling a light snowfall in a remote Japanese retreat, he rejoices that he had no camera to capture the moment, leaving the business of future record to Temple, freed by the apparent imminence of oblivion.

Dr Feelgood’s Wilko Johnson on Shunkoin Temple in Kyoto

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It’s significant that while recording Wilko’s putative last will and testament, Temple was facing up to the loss of his mother (to whom this film is dedicated), clearly drawing strength from Johnson’s life-affirming spirit. All the more ironic, then, that the prospect of an 11th-hour reprieve allows the first note of doubt to seep into this symphony of sanguine acceptance. Only when offered the Blade Runner-esque possibility of “more life” does Johnson briefly lose his positive focus, the rigours of surgery and the luxury of time allowing the demons of depression to encroach briefly upon his state of grace. The real battle, he realises, is to appreciate life in the absence of death, something that proves a lot trickier than it sounds.

On the evidence of his performance at the 100 Club, it’s a trick Johnson will yet have many years to perfect; at the age of 68, he seems more alive than when I first saw him at the Hammersmith Odeon in the 70s, his bald head more youthful than the pudding bowl that once shivered preposterously atop his quivering frame. As for Temple, he has proved himself one of Britain’s most distinctively dramatic documentarians, with works such as Requiem for Detroit? and The Filth and the Fury exhibiting a Wellesian love of the intersection between art and reality. Like Wilko, his films exude an irrepressibly punky joie de vivre. Encore!